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Liberia Uneasily Linked to Ivory Coast Conflict

A United Nations peacekeeper with Ivorian refugees in Liberia, where for years war was a job opportunity. A new war beckons.Credit
Glenna Gordon/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

PÉHÉ-KANHOUÉBLI, Ivory Coast — Standing by a burned-out house on a road speckled with spent ammunition casings, Brig. Gen. Gueu Michel, the commander of rebel forces in western Ivory Coast, outlined his plan to stem an influx of Liberian mercenaries he said were fighting for Ivory Coast’s embattled strongman, Laurent Gbagbo.

“Gbagbo’s troops are composed of the Ivorian Army, the Liberian mercenaries and the militia,” he said recently, pointing to a carefully folded map. “We want to cut off the mercenary flow into Côte d’Ivoire.”

But the traffic at the border moved in two directions. As General Michel’s troops gained ground, a tide of refugees escaping the crisis crossed the porous and remote border into Liberia, a country with a fragile grip on stability itself.

According to the United Nations, more than 100,000 people have fled to Liberia, an exodus visible in the women with bundles on their heads and babies on their backs, trudging on or sitting exhausted by trail sides. And as the struggle over Ivory Coast spills beyond its borders, many fear it will rattle a region still trying to recover from its own history of civil war.

“There’s been a lot of investment for peace in this subregion; we’re beginning to see the result of that investment,” she added. “If nothing is done to resolve the crisis, all of these efforts will be undermined.”

Ivory Coast was once a bastion of stability in a troubled region, its skyscraper-studded commercial capital, Abidjan, a favored expatriate posting. Then a civil war in 2002 left Ivory Coast divided between a south loyal to Mr. Gbagbo and a rebel-controlled north.

Ivorians went to the polls in November to heal those wounds, but Mr. Gbagbo refused to step down after losing to his rival, Alassane Ouattara, prompting a long standoff with the international community and, now, a rebel advance to try to expel Mr. Gbagbo by force.

As part of that campaign, General Michel’s entourage included fashionable young men in sunglasses and civilian clothes alongside fighters in fatigues carrying Kalashnikovs. The general himself wore a neatly pressed uniform, with a name tag on his breast, and insisted he was operating under the command of Mr. Ouattara.

Liberian and United Nations officials said the general was correct to suspect Liberian mercenaries of crossing into Ivory Coast to help Mr. Gbagbo stay in power. Harrison S. Karnwea Sr., Liberia’s interior minister, pointed to the recovery of a Liberian voter registration card from a combatant inside Ivory Coast.

“According to what we hear, both sides are recruiting Liberian mercenaries,” he said. “When people have been used to living on violence, they have got no profession to earn their living on.”

But officials contended that the biggest risk to regional destabilization was the exodus heading in the other direction. Liberia is profoundly fragile after being consumed by civil war for much of the 1990s, a conflict that created warlords and drugged-up child soldiers. Today, eight years after the end of hostilities, there are still 8,000 United Nations troops in the country. While Liberia’s entire budget is $375 million, the peacekeeping mission costs $500 million a year, the United Nations said.

Ellen Margrethe Loej, the head of the United Nations Mission in Liberia, is most concerned about arms from Ivory Coast crossing the border. “After the civil war, disarmament was fairly — if not very — successful in Liberia, but there are still a lot of weapons around in Côte d’Ivoire,” she said. “The border is very porous.”

Photo

Ivorians have sought safety in Ghana as well as in Liberia.Credit
The New York Times

A generation of young Liberians knew only war, and at least some found opportunity in taking part in it. Since then, great efforts have been made to encourage a different way of life.

“Liberia’s taken the last seven years and some months to rein in the guys who had been fighting,” said Michael McGovern, a political anthropologist at Yale who studies West Africa. Now, he said, there is a risk of people being “torn out of the social fabric they had been woven back into.”

The refugees have already overwhelmed some villages. At Old Pohan, a Liberian settlement next to the thickets that extend to the border, refugees greatly outnumbered the local population, and more were arriving all the time.

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“We don’t have sleeping places, and the refugees are more than us; no food,” said a villager, Victor Gaye.

The refugees themselves, some wearing Laurent Gbagbo campaign T-shirts that suggested they were opposed to the advancing rebels, spoke of a desperate trek south after an attack on the Ivorian town of Bloléquin.

“We were in the bush for one week,” said Zoué Bah Suzanne, 52. “Since I arrived, I want food to eat, I want a sleeping place to lie down.”

With tens of thousands of refugees already in Liberia, United Nations officials said they were struggling to muster an international response, at a time when many other crises were demanding the world’s attention.

“If you see the news in any international TV channel today you see Libya, Libya, Libya,” said António Guterres, the United Nations high commissioner for refugees, during a tour of affected areas in Liberia.

Seeking to move the Ivorians away from border settlements, the United Nations has opened a camp about 25 miles inside Liberia. Lines of tents stretch out in freshly cleared jungle, itself dust-blanched at the end of the dry season.

But only a few thousand refugees have come, because those at the border do not want to go farther, some already having settled for weeks.

Refugees are also starting to cross in significant numbers into Ghana, which is far more stable than Liberia. But Abidjan, which rebel forces reached on Thursday, lies close to the border, potentially sending a surge of refugees into Ghana.

Ivory Coast has millions of foreign laborers, including many from Burkina Faso. If they are forced to flee, their home country, which is desperately poor, may struggle to accommodate them.

“If there is a total collapse of the economy, there will be a further social impact on their countries of origin,” Mr. Guterres said.

Konate Sidiki, a former Ivorian minister of tourism, now the secretary of organization for the rebels, argued that despite the humanitarian consequences, “there is no other solution” but force against Mr. Gbagbo.

“For three months we try to discuss, we try to negotiate,” he said.

Correction: April 2, 2011

Because of an editing error, an article on Friday about refugees from Ivory Coast who have been fleeing into neighboring countries referred incorrectly to the area of Ghana that borders Ivory Coast. It is western Ghana, not eastern Ghana.

A version of this article appears in print on April 1, 2011, on Page A9 of the New York edition with the headline: Liberia Uneasily Linked To Ivory Coast Conflict. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe